FUNDS MAY BE FLOWING AGAIN

S.D. budget plan restores city’s share of support for San Dieguito River Park

Amount the joint powers authority has been able to raise in the past 25 years for San Dieguito River Park

$250K

San Diego’s annual contribution to the joint powers authority

About 2½ years ago, the agency that oversees the San Dieguito River Park took a financial hit that it’s been reeling from ever since. But now order has been restored in its financial universe.

In San Diego Mayor Bob Filner’s budget announced Monday, he restored the city’s portion of funding for the park that the previous administration had dropped in early 2011. The agency can now stop worrying so much about money and get back to concentrating on its core mission: preserving the river and the land around it from development.

The park stretches 55 miles from the river’s source on Volcan Mountain near Julian all the way to tidal wetlands near Del Mar. It will one day include 75 miles of connected trails that will allow people to hike from the mountains to the sea.

The additional money will allow the hiring of rangers and maintenance workers critical to the trail’s ultimate success, officials say.

The park agency, called a joint powers authority, was established in 1989 to acquire land in the river valley. One of its goals is to create the trail system from the mountains to the ocean, and most of the land needed for that has been purchased.

The board that operates the authority consists of representatives of the areas protected by the river park: San Diego County, Escondido, Poway, San Diego, Solana Beach and Del Mar.

Each jurisdiction has traditionally committed funds to the authority, but in early 2011 then-San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, citing budget constraints, stopped the city’s funding.

The city’s annual contribution of just over $250,000 represented 36 percent of the authority’s budget, a percentage that was based on the amount of land and number of people who live in the area.

“When the city opted out, that cut our budget by one-third overnight,” said the park’s executive director, Dick Bobertz.

The park had only 10 employees. “That doesn’t give you much wiggle room,” Bobertz said. So to save about $150,000 in salary and benefits, Bobertz retired but continued working full time as a volunteer director.

The remaining staff still had to make sacrifices with cuts, frozen benefits and no pay raises.

Bobertz also was concerned that the other authority members were growing restless having to pay while San Diego got a free ride.

“If we hadn’t gotten the city back in this cycle, it would have been increasingly difficult to keep our other members going, because there was a lot of resentment that they were picking up the city’s share,” he said.

Contributions this year from the remaining members total about $850,000, Bobertz said.

He said 85 percent of the $160 million the authority has been able to raise from corporations and in grants over the past quarter-century to preserve the area around the river was accomplished in San Diego.